


Birthright

by flaming_muse



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies), Thor - All Media Types
Genre: Death, Gen, Not Really Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-07
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2019-01-30 20:19:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12660705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flaming_muse/pseuds/flaming_muse
Summary: "Hela knows there’s unrest outside the doors, thousands of Asgardians not yet eager to bow to her.  But she’s unworried.  They will bow.  Alive or dead, they will most certainly fall to their knees on the blood-soaked ground and know that she rules them."A bit of Hela and Skurge in the throne room.Takes place during Thor: Ragnarok.





	Birthright

**Author's Note:**

> So, Hela. Yeah. She was beyond awesome, and powerful, and who she was born to be.

Hela curls her fingers over the edges of the throne - once promised to her, before her father grew old and foolish - and looks out over the hall. It’s littered with debris and bodies, the smell of death and dust thick in the air. The gilded majesty of her father’s perfect throne room is destroyed, collapsed in pieces at her feet.

Just where it belongs.

The room is even more beautiful than she had remembered in her many years away. It’s more beautiful than she’d often imagined it could be when she’d stood on this dais beside her father and called for Asgard’s armies to strike down their enemies until the rivers were running thick and red with their blood.

Being banished for so long, there had been much for her to miss from the nine realms. This - the freshness of death, the immediacy of the power of destruction, the sheer pleasure of watching something vibrant crumble into nothing but waste - she missed most of all.

She smiles, her mouth twisting in ways she’d almost forgotten were possible in the years since she was last in Asgard.

She knows there’s unrest outside the doors, thousands of Asgardians not yet eager to bow to her. But she’s unworried. They will bow. Alive or dead, they will most certainly fall to their knees on the blood-soaked ground and know that she rules them.

The arm of the throne cracks under her fingers, a quiet sound that races up her arm like fire and makes her smile more.

She is back where she belongs, and it is all hers. Finally, to do with as her nature demands. Finally, to fulfill the promise of her birth.

She was born to be here. She was born to rule this realm and all others. She was born to tear down all who try to stand against her, as she once did with her father’s blessing and her own wild laugh in her ears.

“Home at last,” she muses. “Daughter of Odin, his rightful heir. I will finish what we started, even if he would not.”

Skurge clears his throat, and she pulls her mind back from battles past and parents lost to the wild and enticing present before her.

Hela can almost hear the rapid beat of his heart, proclaiming his life second after second, and it is intoxicating. She has missed that sound, too, as much as she also loves the silence of that life being quickly and definitively ended.

“Yes?” she asks, turning her attention to him.

“Your brothers - “ Skurge starts. He’s wary, as he should be, and he stops speaking at the lift of her hand.

“Do you think I should fear them?” She waits with interest for his answer. She can feel the hot gush of his blood that will flow over her fingers if he gets it wrong. “Me?”

“No,” he replies quickly, and she’s almost disappointed that he is correct. “I just meant that it’s possible they could return. They have cheated death before.”

“The god of thunder and the god of _mischief_ ,” she says with a laugh, full of a derision she has no interest in trying to contain. “A bit of rain and a few lies can do me no harm.”

“Thor doesn’t actually make it rain - “

Hela rises from the throne, and the abruptness of her movement makes Skurge jerk a step backwards. She remembers whole armies breaking in fear at the sight of her face turning toward them. She can’t wait for it to happen again.

“Thor was a pretty child with a broken hammer,” she tells him, and her fingers curl in the remembered pleasure of how easily Mjollnir crumbled in her grip. “And Loki had no power besides tricks to coerce and confuse, nothing but dishonesty and illusion.” She lifts her arms and spreads out her hands, feeling the growing rush of power flowing through every inch of her veins as Asgard pours its life into her. “My _brothers_ were silly, weak children. They could not stand against me. They were born to squabble, to compromise, to love. That is how Odin made them. I, on the other hand, was born to _this_.” She sweeps her arm to show the devastated room around them. ”A few sparks and a silver tongue cannot stand against death itself.”

Hela smiles again and looks around her beautiful throne room. It is no longer perfect, it no longer gleams, but the destruction is more glorious than gems and gold could ever be. It is real, just as death is real. Death is honest. There can be no hiding or artifice in the face of her power. There can be no plastering over death with pleasant murals and false words. No illusion, no fine speeches, no sense of moral superiority is enough to hide the truth.

Death is real, the realest and most powerful thing of all.

_She_ is.

Everything else must fall.

She will - because she wants to, because she _needs_ to - _make_ it fall.

“If they even still live, my brothers are nothing,” she says with a laugh.

Thor - as fair as Frigga and as dumb as an ox - wished to be a king in their father’s image, but Hela is the one who overthrew Odin in the end. It was death - _her_ power, _her_ birthright - that claimed him, even in her absence.

Loki - who shared none of her blood but who in his sharpness and endless hunger resembled her more - used his magic to trick Asgard to follow him, to win for once in his pointless life.

“It is _I_ who always wins,” Hela says to herself, to Skurge, to all of Asgard. “Even the All-Father, my father, knew I can only be contained for so long.”

She looks past Skurge, through him, through the palace and out into the stars.

“I know my place,” she says and feels the rightness of her words, the rightness of her power, the rightness of the ground beneath her feet, smeared with blood and dust. “And it is everywhere.”


End file.
